Storm Warnings in Mali

Well, here I am, at about 35,000 feet, just finishing my meal in, wait for it, Air France Club Class. Now, before you get all upset and hair-shirtish, and rush off to complain to the Charity Commission, I must insist, that SPANA has not paid a penny for all this. So, I have just finished my ‘garantit ce repas sans viande de porc’ and endured the cultural and culinary disaster of having the cheese BEFORE the dessert (no wonder the French colonies rebelled so violently) – let me explain.

ITV (or award-winning film-maker Chris Terrill to be precise) are making a series of films on ‘storms’.

They’ve already done tornados in Kansas, white-outs in Norway, gales in the southern oceans, now they want to do sand-storms in the Sahara.

So who better to contact than SPANA? And as they will also show us working with the Tuareg, training para-vets and looking after their herds of camels, sheep and goats (pretty impressive free publicity) – and as I said earlier – paying for it all, how could I say ‘no’ ?

But it’s no holiday. Five O’clock start this morning, dragging seventy kilos of baggage (yes, how could we not take advantage of the opportunity of taking stacks of medicines and goodies out with us ?), across London to Heathrow. Then, when film-maker Chris Terrill finally arrived, he had seven boxes of filming equipment!
Air France, having weighed and labelled all the stuff, suddenly decided that they had a rule that only three pieces of baggage were allowed per person.

So off it all came again.

Then after frantic phone calls, and offers of bucket loads of money, they decided it ‘might be possible’ after all. So, all the boxes got weighed and labelled a second time.

Then they all had to be taken off again. Wrong shapes and sizes.

Finally we waved goodbye to them, at ‘special bagage’. By this time we only had about ten minutes to get through the traumas of ‘security’, and run to the boarding gate and get on the plane – just to find someone already in my seat.

But did I complain? Very much aware of the ‘Entente Cordiale’, I just said ‘n’importe quoi’ to the very large Malian lady, and found somewhere else.
Now the trick in Charles de Gaulle Airport, is not minding very much if your luggage doesn’t make it ‘en correspondance’ to the onwards flight. Or maybe it’s just with the flights from England, a sort of revenge for Agincourt or Waterloo or whatever.
But when I asked at the Bamako check-in desk, if our luggage had made it across, she replied ‘Biensur, monsieur, - and by the way, you ‘ave been up-graded’.

Zut alors!

But not my chum from ITV. So after some pretty feeble protestations, that, er, by right he should have the exalted position, here I am. Can’t think why,
Maybe they think I’m some sort of trouble-maker.!

What fun it’s going to be getting all those boxes through the customs in Bamako.

Jeremy Hulme